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This is our contribution to the Global Peter Drucker Form (GPDF). This years conference discussion focuses on inclusive prosperity. In our blog post, we outline nothing less than a possible approach to globally foster entrepreneurship and help to decrease income disparities.

What did Jeff Bezos do in 2002 to turn Amazon into the business ecosystem that it is today? He discovered how to scale his operations very fast, across multiple markets, and how to follow up on business opportunities and customer needs across industries with blinding speed. Today, companies worldwide scramble to copy Amazons explosive growth and diversified business.

In the following, we will outline how to do it, and do it in such a way that it leads to broader prosperity and innovation for society: A lifetime opportunity for entrepreneurs …

Most businesses today base their operations on the exploitation of a few well-understood business opportunities. They have optimized their performance to make the most of these opportunities, and defend their turf against competitors in their market. This focus on a single market, a single type of business and a known type of competitors will likely not be sufficient to ensure long-term success. The age of hyper-dynamic markets will bring along competitors from outside of established markets. It will lead to much more innovation. It will lead to products and services that can easily be substituted. It will lead to a much shorter lifecycle of products, business models, and business operations.

The age of hyper-dynamic markets will be brought along by connected products and services, and by businesses that can quickly and deeply connect their operations through digital interfaces. We already observe this happening in some industries. It won’t stop there. All industries will likely be connected through digital interfaces sooner rather than later. This is the time when businesses start to connect operations across industrial domains that until now clearly separate markets and business opportunities from each other.

What does this age of hyper-dynamic, digitally connected markets mean for businesses today? It means that businesses can not rely anymore on a single line of successful operations. This single line of operations will inevitably loose its competitive edge and profitability one day. Hyper-dynamic markets make it impossible to predict when this will happen, reducing the time to adapt to zero. Businesses therefore need to be ready for the end of their money-making operations at any time.

As a way to balance this risk, they need to prepare themselves by building specific capabilities now, while there is still time:

Widening the scope of innovation beyond current branches of business

Easy, early and quick testing of new business opportunities

Partnering and collaboration across industries

Flexible scaling mechanisms according to market demand

This leads towards instant collaboration across established domains, industries and groups of stakeholders. Collaboratively shaping business opportunities into new markets becomes the regular mode of operation in hyper-dynamic markets.

How to do this? We explore breakthrough concepts for this challenge in our book FUTURE LEGENDS – Business in Hyper-Dynamic Markets. Our next post in this series will explain how to turn businesses into marketplaces for crossover innovation and collaboration.